J. Jance - Fire and Ice

Losing two valued members of her team-George Winfield and Frank Montoya-at once had come as a severe body blow to Joanna’s administration, and the constant readjustment uproar inside her department since then had left her reeling. For months, Joanna’s officers had been plagued by having to work with a series of contract M.E.s who had filled in on a temporary basis. A month earlier, the Board of Supervisors had finally gotten around to hiring George’s permanent replacement. They had given the M.E. nod to Dr. Guy Machett, a newcomer to Cochise County, and to Arizona as well, who had earned both his medical degree and his pathology specialty from Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Machett was energetic and smart, but he seemed overly impressed with himself along with his high-blown credentials. He often prefaced derogatory remarks about southeastern Arizona with the words “Where I come from…,” to which Joanna often wanted to reply, “So why don’t you go back there?”

Two weeks earlier, in the aftermath of a tragic automobile accident, Joanna had seen Dr. Machett interact with grieving family members of a young man who had died as a result of a single-vehicle rollover. In dealing with the parents, Machett had exhibited zero amounts of charm and even less empathy. As Joanna had told her husband, Butch, after that uncomfortable encounter, “Guy Machett has the bedside manner of your basic bullfrog.” Butch had laughed off her comment, but as far as Joanna was concerned, the situation with Dr. Machett was no laughing matter.

For one thing, he had insisted on establishing an official “chain of command” style of operation. When George Winfield had been running the show, Joanna’s detectives had been allowed unlimited access to him. They had been encouraged to contact the M.E. directly whenever they judged that the situation warranted his involvement. Not so with Dr. Machett. As far as he was concerned, lowly homicide detectives, people Machett deemed to be somehow beneath him, had to “go through channels”-which is to say through Joanna or through his office-in order to contact him or summon him to a crime scene. And he had made it clear that no one, under any circumstances, was to refer to him as Doc. He was Dr. Machett, thank you very much.

Despite his apparent arrogance, Joanna couldn’t help but wonder if it was possible that he was putting on a front. For one thing, although he was several years older than Joanna, he was relatively new and untried as far as doing the job was concerned. And he didn’t have the foggiest idea about the importance of winning friends and influencing people. In fact, in the course of a few short weeks, he had managed to create a whole cheering section of people who were actively rooting for the man to fall flat on his face.

“But Machett is on his way to the crime scene?” Joanna asked.

“Beats the hell out of me,” Ernie replied. “According to Madge, he’ll get back to me. I take that to mean he’ll get back to me eventually-when he’s damned good and ready.”

“What do you think we have?” Joanna asked, changing the subject away from Dr. Machett’s all-too-obvious shortcomings and back to the victim.

“The guy who called it in thought it was an ATV accident. Now that I’ve seen it, I’d have to say from the tracks that it looks more like a hit-and-run,” Ernie said. “Or else maybe a hit, hit, hit-and-run. I think the dead guy was run down deliberately, and whoever did it is long gone. It looks to me like he was run over several different times by the same vehicle, or maybe once each by several separate vehicles.”

“ATVs?” Joanna asked.

“I’d say we’re looking for something bigger than that,” Ernie replied. “And I don’t know how many. One for sure, but maybe more.”

“What about having CSI make casts of the tracks?” she asked. “Surely you’d be able to tell the number of vehicles from the number of tracks.”

“Sorry, boss, no can do,” Ernie said. “These are sand dunes.”

“Sand dunes?” Joanna repeated. Driving to California, she remembered being impressed by the glorious red sand dunes west of Yuma along I-8. She had lived in Cochise County all her life. The idea that there might be sand dunes much closer to home came as something of a shock. “I didn’t know we had any of those,” she said.

“You do now,” Ernie told her. “And believe me, tracks that are left in sand like what’s here aren’t remotely castable.”

“What about identification?”

“None on the body,” he said, “at least none that we’ve found so far.”

“What about the dog? Does it have tags?”

“Maybe so. He was wearing a collar and it looks like he has tags, but no one can get close enough to read them. Natalie’s working on him now, trying to get him into her truck. Once she does that, maybe she’ll be able to tell us something. When I get off the phone with you, I’ll ask her.”

“All right then,” Joanna said. “I’m on my way.”

“Good,” Ernie said. “I’m glad to hear it. Dave Hollicker is headed here as well.”

Most of the time, Joanna’s CSI unit was a two-person team made up of Dave and Casey Ledford, Joanna’s latent fingerprint tech. Unfortunately, Casey was currently out of town attending a training conference on the latest upgrades in AFIS-the nationwide Automated Fingerprint Identification System. With Casey unavailable, Dave Hollicker was reduced to being a one-man show.

Joanna put down her phone and donned her Kevlar vest, then opened the door to her office and spoke to her secretary, Kristin Gregovich.

“How long will you be gone?” Kristin wanted to know.

“It’s a crime scene,” Joanna told her. “I’ll be back eventually; I just don’t know when.”

Relieved to have an excuse to leave her paperwork jungle behind, Joanna hurried out her private back entrance and into her Crown Victoria parked a few steps from her door. A few minutes later, she was driving east on U.S. Highway 80, heading for Double Adobe, Elfrida, and ultimately Bowie.

Joanna’s jurisdiction, Cochise County, was an eighty-square-mile block of territory as large as Rhode Island and Connecticut combined. On the south it was bordered by Mexico and on the east by New Mexico. Her office in the Justice Center was in the lower right-hand corner of the county. The crime scene was seventy miles straight north of there-except she couldn’t drive straight north. The roads didn’t run that way.

Along the highway, she was glad to see the signs of spring-the bright greens of newly leafed mesquite and the carpet of bright yellow flowers that lined either side of the roadway. Lost in thought, she had driven only a few miles when her phone rang.

“Sheriff Brady here,” she said.

“I found Bowie on my GPS,” Guy Machett said without preamble or greeting. “I can make it there just fine, but where the hell is the crime scene?”

His attitude grated on Joanna as much as his words did. He pronounced Bowie the outlander way, Bowie as in bow tie as opposed to the approved southeastern Arizona pronunciation.

“It’s pronounced boo-ee,” she told him.

“That’s not how it’s spelled in my BlackBerry,” he returned.

And obviously your BlackBerry couldn’t be wrong, Joanna thought to herself. “But it is how people around here say it,” she told him. And it’s how you’ll pronounce it, too, if you don’t want the locals laughing at you.

“The crime scene is northeast of there,” she said. “Some GPS receivers don’t cover those rural roads and areas very well.”

“I was scheduled to be at a continuing ed conference in Tucson all day today,” Machett said. “It bugs the hell out of me to miss it, but I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“If you’re leaving Tucson now, you should arrive in about an hour then,” Joanna said. “That’s about the time I’ll get there as well. Call me. I’ll help guide you in.”